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Mozilla Announces Extend Firefox Contest Winners 163

Posted by CowboyNeal from the best-of-show dept.
Foxy Betty writes "Mozilla Corporation has announced the winners of the Extend Firefox Contest, a project initiated to encourage development of extensions for the Firefox Web browser. A panel of industry notables reviewed more than 200 extensions submitted to the contest."
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Mozilla Announces Extend Firefox Contest Winners More

Mozilla Announces Extend Firefox Contest Winners

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  • If only AdBlock [mozdev.org] had been updated for the competition... That's probably the 1 addon I couldn't live without.

    • Re:If only... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Spad ( 470073 ) <`slashdot' `at' `spad.co.uk'> on Friday March 03, 2006 @08:51AM (#14841819) Homepage
      http://adblockplus.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

      • Re:If only... (Score:2, Informative)

        by tryggvi ( 956119 )
        I actually find NoScript better than Adblock since most ads are generated using javascript I don't have to think about blocking the ads on a new page since they are already blocked (javascript not executed).

        Still one needs Adblock for hard-coded ads, but with NoScript a lot of adblocking is prevented (and the browser becomes more secure).

        • Re:If only... (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ThePhilips ( 752041 )
          AdBlock can block scripts too. In fact AdBlock can block almost anything: images, iframes, embeds, objects, etc.

          Not all people are that good with HTML/Web terminology: AdBlock unfortunately use lots of it. It's okay for me. But my friend e.g. has whole bunch of extensions (a-la FlashBlock, NoScript) which in fact do what I do with AdBlock alone.

          • Re:If only... (Score:4, Informative)

            by Lispy ( 136512 ) on Friday March 03, 2006 @10:58AM (#14842435) Homepage
            Hey, you probably know that, but there is a well maintained, autoupdated set of rules for almost all Ads out there.
            It's called Filterset G [mozilla.org].
            This in addition to Adblock plus keeps all ads out of sight without having to configure a single thing. No worries. :)

            I highly recommend it to anyone and it's part of my default install for friends...
            • I've tried it at home but found that I consider to be ads much broader range of content...

              And not everyone knows about the filtersets. And it's very accustomized to U.S. providers. E.g. I see quite much ads on German and Russians sites. And with filtersets installed, adding another rule is bit more difficult than with plain AdBlock.

              Anyway, I use AdBlock for quite some time and my rule set is *very* long and kills *all* what *I* consider ad, not some other guys.

              • True. The extra comfort comes with less configurability. But as I don't want to spend my time reading ads nor configuring adblock and I use quite a lot of different machines throughout the day I settled for the painless solution.

                I live in Germany myself and must say that it works great even for german sites.
            • I find *ad* blocks 99.99% of all adds.
              • Not to mention:

                www.myforumsite.example.com/forum/admin
                www.myfilerepository.example.com/downloads
                www.mycommunity.example.com/adduser.php ...

                • If you click on a link to a page directly, adblock doesn't block it. So unless its an embedded object (flash, image, etc) with *ad* in it you're good.
                  • Ah, that's cool. I know for a fact it wasn't always that way. I still remember wondering why the hell I kept getting "Document contained no data" or something like that when I would try to hit sourceforge. :)
            • I install this hosts file [mvps.org] also which is a list of sites that the browser shouldn't access because of ads or other similar things. A quote from the site says it best:

              The Hosts file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. This file is loaded into memory (cache) at startup, then Windows checks the Hosts file before it queries any DNS servers, which enables it to override addresses in the DNS. This prevents access to the listed sites by redirecting any connection attempts back to the local machine

          • Re:If only... (Score:3, Interesting)

            by A beautiful mind ( 821714 )
            Not entirely true though. I use NoScript to block in-html javascript on sites.

            I've also extended my own version of AdBlock to incorporate a new feature which I named relative-to-site blocking: you define what the "site" is with a regexp, a few special modifiers and filter non-matching content from it with a regexp. For example, the following rule:

            ##\dom##.*

            Would block all content which is not coming from the domain currently in the status bar, so if you're surfing example.com images and javascript lin
    • I actually don't use adblock. What I do use is flashblock. This cuts out 95% of the annoying ads. I don't mind seeing ads as long as they aren't really annoying and intrusive. I think Noscript would be nice too, for those really annoying ones that show up and move around over the content you are viewing. But I don't use it because there are enough sites out there that need javascript to function correctly, such that it would be annoying to have to enable it for every new site I went to. The thing tha

      • Re:If only... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by leonmergen ( 807379 )

        Exactly; if you want ad agencies to "get your message", try to actually block the ads you find annoying instead of blocking _all_ ads... if flash/dhtml ads get less and less views compared to "normal" banners, they will get the message...

        • if you want ad agencies to "get your message", try to actually block the ads you find annoying

          What if "your message" is "I hope you get the plague and die and take your kids with you for the sake of the gene pool?"

          • What if "your message" is "I hope you get the plague and die and take your kids with you for the sake of the gene pool?"

            Then you need a mental institute more badly than an adblocker...

  • improved updater (Score:2, Interesting)

    by cpdsaorg ( 733031 )
    How about upgrading the windows version without leaving the old version number in the add/remove programs? I have to update 40 or 50 machines at a time and it's a pain uninstalling before installing.
  • AdBlock with FilterSet updater Image Zoom Tabbrowser Preferences

  • A bit staid? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ithika ( 703697 ) on Friday March 03, 2006 @08:50AM (#14841813) Homepage
    They're probably really nice and elegant and all that but ... are they not just a wee bitty dull? I mean, two out of the three winners appear to create thumbnails of pages (whether from the history or other open pages). And while Web Developer is a fantastic package it's hardly cutting edge and new. I was hoping for something with real pizzaz. Something where the very idea and description was enough to make me go, "wow".

    Anyone else find it a bit anticlimactic?

    • Re:A bit staid? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by pneumatus ( 936254 ) *
      The only extension that i've ever used (and don't mind but wouldn't consider it essential to my browsing experience) is Sage [mozilla.org] and that came a lousy second place to Viamatic Foxprose [mozilla.org] - something that appears to be wholly useless in the 'Most Innovative' category.

      • Re:A bit staid? (Score:3, Informative)

        by WiFiBro ( 784621 )
        Second? I see they made a division between 'new' and 'upgraded'.Sage is 'upgraded'.
        • My appologies - A misinterpretation on my part Sage did win the best upgraded extension in the "Most Innovative" category. I think my confusion came from seeing Reveal as the best overall extension and also the best user experience new extension... Another one for the RTFA brigade i think :)

    • I thought the Separe extension was completely useless. If you really want to visually separate tabs, just open a new window and start fresh. That, or get glasses if you can't scan your tabs.

      I suppose at some point FF extensions have to hit a wall for new and innovative things. Personally, I'm still waiting for the "don't use 300MB of memory" extension.

      • I'm still waiting for the "don't use 300MB of memory" extension.

        That's easily solved. Simply remove all but 256MB of RAM from your computer, and disable any swap space you had configured, and Firefox's memory usage will fall by at least 15%.

      • Re:A bit staid? (Score:2, Funny)

        by edremy ( 36408 )
        Let's not get ahead of ourselves. I want the "Don't use 1GB of memory" extension first.

      • Re:A bit staid? (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dan Ost ( 415913 )
        I run Firefox in Linux and don't have any memory problems with Firefox. gconfd-2, on the other hand, gobbles up 100M or so overnight, so I end up restarting Firefox just to get gconfd-2 to restart.

        Can anyone explain why a configuration daemon eats up 100M overnight? When I start it up, it only takes about 10M.
      • Oh, I think Séparé might make sense for me. I use Tab Mix Plus with the mosewheel-scrolled tab bar. Unfortunately this is a bit problematic in conjunction with the Mighty Mouse, which has a very sensitive "wheel", which sometimes goes off while you middle-click, causing you to accidentally hit the wrong tab. Sure, you can undo he close but I'd prefer accidentally closing a separator than a real tab.

    • Re:A bit staid? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ROOK*CA ( 703602 )
      I was hoping for something with real pizzaz. Something where the very idea and description was enough to make me go, "wow"

      Well one of the nice things about open source is that one idea tends to spawn other ideas, in other words IMHO it tends to be evolutionary rather revolutionary, perhaps this years winners will act as the catalyst(s) that lead to one or more extensions that give you that "wow" feelin'. Remember FireFox is still (relatively speaking) a young "platform" and there have already been quite

    • Re:A bit staid? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by WiFiBro ( 784621 ) on Friday March 03, 2006 @09:20AM (#14841926)
      Web Developer may be totally useless for end-users, but for web page developers it is amazing, it is really grabbing the html by the balls.
      • Agreed. When checking a page for use under IE, I often start to go up to the toolbar to use a Web Developer tool, only to be disappointed that it's not there.

        • There's always the IE Developer Toolbar [microsoft.com] from Microsoft. It's Beta 2 (but stable on my machine - YMMV) and isn't quite as wonderful as the FF extension, but it's still pretty helpful when you're trying to work out what on earth IE thinks it's playing at.

    • Install this [mozilla.org]to read the following:

      US3KDP6BklCiVjtyJft3Yw==

      use password: funky0011-pass

    • Re:A bit staid? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
      Web developer is a god send for people who do web development for a living. I don't know how people get by without it. Seriously. It has so many useful features that I can't think of a day I've gone without using it. That, along with the Venkman Javascript debugger, have made my life as a web developer 10 times easier. Microsoft et al should have stuff like this for web development environments.
      • It'd be nice is Venkman was updated for 1.5. I loved the thing, but left it behind when I upgraded.

        On a related note, Eclipse has the Ajax Tools Framework [eclipse.org] proposal that looks to be very promising for developers. I currently use Eclipse and the WTP for JSP/Struts development, and its excellent, but debugging javascript is still a pain.
    • I agree, most of the extensions don't break new ground or are even that interesting. Some of them only save a couple steps. I was hoping for something a little more adventerous or cool.

    • Platypus (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DingoGroton ( 885094 )
      One of the finalists really stood out to me, Platypus [mozdev.org], which allows users to dynamically edit the sites they visit and then be able to save the changes to a GreaseMonkey script. It works great on getting rid of some of those annoyances on sites you visit.
      • Someone above complained about extensions being a bit "staid." I think this one looks like it has some definite potential. I may have to fool around with it a bit.
    • Considering the fact that they catgorized them in the manner that they did, I can't complain.

      I will say that the fact that both reveal and showcase seem dangerously similar, and even use the same access keys (which cannot be changed without modifying the extension's source) which seemed a bit dissapointing.

      As a web developer, the web developer extension is probably my favorite feature of Firefox. If it came down to it, I would choose the web developer extension over tabbed browsing (but just barely). I wa
    • two out of the three winners appear to create thumbnails of pages ... anyone else find it a bit anticlimactic?

      More than a bit. Someone above mentioned that they'd like to see something innovative which I agree with. (But then the other poster said gestures, which is a copy from Opera. I think copying innovation isn't innovation. Unless you're MicroSoft.)

      I think the extension I've used most is blockfall. Most of the others that interest me I don't use - instead I use Proxomitron and Opera for those feat

  • Scrapbook looks interesting. Looks like a better way to re-visit older pages without using the history. Web Developer is dang near indespensible for anybody who does anything with web development. Not a surprise that Chris got top prize for it. The rest of it - meh - doesn't suit my web habits. Expose for FIrefox, big whoop. I barely use expose on the Mac. The closest thing that I've seen for good tab visual managment is color coding via domain. Some of these extensions probably have that; I didn't l
  • Congrats to the Winners, I have to say Reveal is a nice little extension and definitely deserves the "honors", FasterFox and IE Tab are also Nice extensions which IMHO are worthy of some "extra credit".

    Ad Block is a sweet extension as well, very effective in getting rid of those annoying "oh so slow to load" flash ads that some cheesy web designers (ad execs?) seem to be in love with.

    Rock on FireFox ..:)
  • Download one link, selected links or all the links of a page at the maximum speed with a single click......FlashGot offers also a Build Gallery functionality which helps to synthetize full media galleries in one page, from serial contents previously scattered on several pages, for easy and fast "download all"


    Great extension [mozilla.org] for Firefox...just don't sue them for Rhyming-Name Infringement ;)
    • I like it, but it forces you to use a download manager but doesn't recommend anything good (stupid attempt at neutrality). I tried a few but they sucked. Could you suggest the best download manager to use with FlashGot on Windows?

  • DANGER (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 03, 2006 @08:57AM (#14841842)
    Do not install all the entrants at once. It would be bad. [splasho.com]

  • Yay for scrapbook getting an award (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The single most usefull extension for Firefox I have found so far.

    If you do research on the web, you'll ask yourself how you were able to live without out, after you gave it a try.

    P.S.: I know this sound like marketing babble, but I'm in no way affiliated with the scrapbook guys, I'm just a fanboy who really loves their work.

  • The winners are ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by gormanly ( 134067 )

    Seeing as the linked page is useless to those of us running non-Firefox 1.5 browsers (Mozilla 1.7.12 here), I looked up the details of what the winners actually are, and thought I'd share ...

    Grand Prize Category Winners:

    Best New Extension Overall: Reveal by Michael Wu
    See everything. Reveal allows you to see thumbnails of pages in your session history and quickly find the page you want. Reveal also includes a magnifying glass to help you see everything.
    Best Upgraded Extension: Web Developer by Chris Ped
  • Has anyone thought to code an extension like Gaim for Firefox? You could call it Aimzilla or something silly like that.
    • There's jabberzilla, which (of course) supported the jabber protocol. But it hasn't had any activity in a while.

      I tried my hand at writing one myself, and got it to the point where I could talk to people and add contacts w/o any problems. It didn't do anything else and was super ugly, though. ^_^
  • Just a note to say that if Opera users want to experience thumbnails, the latest tech preview has 'em. Just mouseover a tab - thumbnail for the page pops up near-instantly.
  • It would be cool if we could have the user agent switcher tool with the capability to assign a particular user agent with a particular site and automatically switch upon loading a site. And the switch must be for a specific tab not all open tabs.

    - For example I might want the switcher to automatically switch to IE7/XP while visiting my bank's site that expects IE.
    - But I may want the switcher to automatically switch to Googlebot while visiting password-protected news sites so that I can go directly in.
  • I wish there was an easier way to sidestep version requirements of extensions. I'm often stuck choosing between security updates and what I consider essential functionality and features. For example, I love TabBrowser Preferences, but its latest version isn't compatible with the latest Firefox v1.5.0.1 so I stick with 1.5. For the longest time after the 1.0 launch, I was still using beta 0.6 because it worked with my extensions and was stable under extreme usage patterns.

    So... any chance for implementing

  • Web Developer (Score:3, Informative)

    by Z0mb1eman ( 629653 ) on Friday March 03, 2006 @09:50AM (#14842048) Homepage
    Glad to see Web Developer [mozilla.org] at the top of the list... it is, IMO, by far the most useful Firefox plugin out there. I've been using it at work for a few months, and even got a few co-workers to install Firefox specifically because they wanted to use this plugin...

    Just one datapoint, but it reinforces in my mind how important plugins (they're plugins, dammit! why are they pushing the term "extension"!) are to Firefox's success. Which, I guess, was the whole point of this contest.
    • why are they pushing the term "extension"!

      Because in the world of browsers, the term "plugin" has a specific meaning: a program that uses a specific API (the Netscape Plugin API) to display types of content (Flash animations, QuickTime videos, etc.) that the browser doesn't support natively.

      Btw, you misspelled "?".
  • It appears that "best" means "of practical use to as few people as possible".
  • This may sound nitpicky, but the headline would be a lot easier to parse if it read like this:

    Mozilla Announces 'Extend Firefox' Contest Winners

    As it is, I had to read it a few times. I kept stopping at the word "Extend" and wondering how to parse two consecutive verbs (Announces Extend).

    I wish newspapers would get a clue and use quotation marks properly as well, but I digress.
  • Okay, does the plush toy [mozilla.org] they're giving away look more like a fox [wikipedia.org] or a racoon [wikipedia.org]?

  • Firefox extensions I can't live without (Score:3, Interesting)

    by peter8888 ( 958690 ) on Friday March 03, 2006 @10:56AM (#14842421)
    These are the Firefox extensions I can't live without

    GooglePreview:
    https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=189 [mozilla.org]

    Venkman Javascript Debugger (for 1.5):
    http://getahead.ltd.uk/ajax/venkman [getahead.ltd.uk]

    Live HTTP Headers:
    http://livehttpheaders.mozdev.org/ [mozdev.org]

    Peter
  • Just tried reading about Reveal [mozilla.org] from Galeon 2.0.1. The mozilla site says

    Incompatible Extension or Extension No Longer Available

    . Apparently, the Mozilla addon site keys off the HTTP_USER_AGENT, and modifies the results accordingly. Except that if your goal is to persuade other people to switch your browser, or at least inform them about it, shouldn't you let users of other browsers at least read about its features?

    FWIW, if I use the search function (searching in extensions) from Galeon, the results returned

  • FireBug [mozilla.org]

    Unlike some other (poorly implemented) AJAX extensions (/greasemonkey plugins) I've seen, this shows complete responses and requests, as well as any javascript errors in-page. This is of enormous value when debugging clientside scripts: usually you only notice a bug when it's causing a page to break. This extension shows any and all errors, regardless of whether they interrupt your pageview.
  • Although we didn't win this time, we think our CookiePie extension is currently very innovative giving you the possibility to open different mail (i.e: Gmail/Yahoo) or web accounts on each tab. More information at: CookiePie Firefox extension [nektra.com]

  • The Grand Prize, an Alienware computer, runs Windows:

    Powered by Windows XP operating systems, the Aurora 7500 provides unparalleled compatibility with hardware, software, and peripheral devices.

    So Linux isn't ready for the desktop, it's not fit for education, and now they can't even give it away. Firefox confirms, Linux is dying!

    (it's funny, laugh)
  • Not a single link on the results page works for me.

    https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php ?id=1810 [mozilla.org]

    Does that URL work for anyone? The same goes for every other id=
  • I recently migrated from Safari to Firefox, and the one thing I have really missed is Safari's autofill. It was perfect. I have an autofill extension for Firefox, but it really stinks. Am I missing a good one? If not, could someone make one as good as the one in Safari?

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